The first time I was in the same building with Walter Zenga was in 1990, at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. He was the starting goalkeeper for Italy, and they were facing Austria in the opening game of the World Cup. Zenga did not allow a goal, which was a fairly common outcome, for him, […]

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Anyone who has run a newspaper sports section knows that eight months of the year, maybe even nine or 10 … you do not have to worry about a section having a newsy feel. News just happens, in the form of scheduled events. Might be news in addition to the scheduled events. Might break your […]

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I tend to like coaches of team sports. Of any of the team sports. They push you towards the goals you would set for yourself if you were not a lazy corner-cutter. They foment teamwork. They have a plan. They have expertise. They have their own perhaps selfish motives, of course. Power, money, ego. But […]

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Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, brother of the president of the UAE, will spend about $100 million to operate a Major League Soccer franchise in Queens, according to a story in the New York Times today. “Two people with knowledge of the negotiations” told the Times that Sheikh Mansour will operate the MLS’s 20th team, an […]

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Mike Lopresti is one of my favorite sports journalists, as well as one of the best sports journalists in the United States over the past 30-some years. We go way back. I met him no later than 1980, and I tried to hire him a few years later — just before he and I and […]

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Rene Douglas wasn’t the best jockey around. He was not Eddie Arcaro, or Bill Shoemaker or Chris McCarron or Gary Stevens. But he was good. Quite good. Good enough to have won more than 3,500 races, including the 1998 Belmont Stakes and the Juvenile Fillies race at the 2006 Breeders’ Cup. Then came a horrific […]

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For a period of about 20 years, from 1989 until 2009, I saw nearly every match the U.S. national soccer team played. Many of them in person. Most of the rest via television. I knew those teams, especially those from the World Cup teams of 1990 through 2002, as well as I have ever known […]

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I wrote about this the other day — the London Times‘s fictional “exclusive” about a huge, world-changing club soccer tournament, the Dream Football League, to be held in Qatar in the height of summer every two years, beginning in 2015. A week later, the former British paper of record, issued what journalists in England call […]

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Biggest sports story since I arrived in Abu Dhabi. The UAE national team won the Gulf Cup tonight! How big is that?

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Not much more to be said about this. Aside, maybe, from “What took you so long?” Two other thoughts:

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